EDIT: I missed this: “The optimal path could to be to fund Guiding Companies who donate according to EA principles, and possibly persuading those who don’t to start giving according to these principles.Both these opportunities seem like they could have very high impact, which is why BOAS is working on the first and CPI on the latter (among other things). ” So perhaps the better question is, are you epistemically indifferent between these two strategies and their odds of success? If not, what leads you to gauge one as more promising than the other?
ORIGINAL POST:
Hey y’all, I’m really enjoying all the research you’re doing and the anecdote about a 20% cold email reply rate is eye-opening to me. I also learned a lot about just how many foundation-operated businesses there are from this post.
One possibility I’m sure you’ve considered, just want to hear your thoughts about it—what about devoting your efforts to guiding existing foundation-owned companies toward donating to more effective charities? I think it’s reasonably well-established that 90% of all startups fail—though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is one of those “everybody knows” things that turns out to be false—so you might say the baseline odds of BOAS succeeding are 10%. Your odds are plausibly a bit better than that because, as you say, foundation-led businesses tend to be better run ; so let’s call it 15%. If you did outreach to every foundation-led company to try to persuade them that they should just give to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund rather than what they’re doing, do you think you have less than 15% chance of succeeding at that—at least, at a scale comparable to what you expect to produce with BOAS?
That might not be the right comparison, it’s just one that comes to mind. Off the top of my head, I think that your “immortalize my legacy” hypothesis is on point, so I suspect that most foundations will want flashy things with names attached rather than giving to a comparatively obscure org like GiveWell. (Side note: I wonder if Newman’s Own Foundation has more mindshare than GiveWell among philanthropists?) Also, there’s something to be said for providing a demonstrative example with BOAS to other potential orgs that is hard to capture in direct comparisons. But anyway, curious to hear what y’all think.
Brad has touched on the other subjects and I mostly agree with those so I won’t touch them.
About why we’re doing BOAS: at first we thought this was almost completely new, and we wanted to show the world that this is a good idea, that it can work, can scale, and is a high EV opportunity. I’m now reasonably convinced that this is a good idea, because we know it works, scales and is high EV (because these companies would be better investments for philanthropists versus their competitors if they gave to EA charities).
Convincing existing GC’s to give according to EA principles seems like EA’s job to me, together with CPI. EA is trying to globalize their principles and if they are successful there are no more GC’s to persuade. Unfortunately, I don’t think EA is good at marketing itself to become truly big, and with my background marketing that might be an area that I someday want to take a stab at, but I’m focusing my work on proving EA aligned GC for now (which I think has much higher EV because almost no-one is working on that versus many movement builders).
I think we haven’t seen this taking off apart from Denmark because of a lack of awareness and choice. You can’t choose to buy your car from a GC or in the case of BOAS, you can’t buy anything sustainable from a GC. So it’s critical to create the awareness and we know from Amazon smile that this could work (high growth with relatively little marketing and awareness), and it’s also critical to build choices. I’m focusing on building that choice and then move on to create awareness.
Writing a bestselling book about this idea, convincing 1000 people to start GC’s, resulting in 100 successful businesses and 10 GC unicorns might be higher value, but then again, I’m a terrible writer.
Convincing 10 billionaires this is a great idea also seems like high EV, and I think that’s something we’re already trying to do with BOAS in the form of showing it can be done and we can multiply their money. But again, I view this more as the job of EA as a whole.
Another high EV would be to establish a GC VC fund that can fund 100 of these businesses and see a couple turn into unicorns, and then we hope more and more will follow.
I have many ideas, but I’m focusing on execution right now.
The big kahuna is going to to be demonstrating the strong competitive effect of Guiding Producers vis a vis competitors. If that can be established, then the many billion dollar philanthropic sector will provide capital, and we can move towards a world in which our global economy is working toward important projects like ending global poverty and ending factory farming. The question is how we get there.
CPI’s approach will be making the public more aware of their ability to support charities through normal economic activity. The way do do this would be direct movement building, such as by social media. Also by having existing Guiding Producers and new Guiding Producers associating with the broader project and enabling people to be a part of it, this will further it as well. This also has the virtue of allowing the exploration of what contexts GC creates the greatest competitive advantages.
Influencing existing GPs to tilt their portfolios toward effective charities is good and high value, but pales in comparison to the value of the broader project. But in the networking project with existing GPs, we may be able to influence them to direct their profits more EAishly. Another nice thing is that it offers a compelling value proposition for EAs who might be skeptical of the broader project. Shifting even a small amount of the existing charity portfolio of GPs could be 10s out 100s of millions in value.
So, in short, from my perspective, influencing existing GPs is high impact/unit cost and would be a worthy project on its own. But it is several orders of magnitude lower EV than the broader project.
EDIT: I missed this: “The optimal path could to be to fund Guiding Companies who donate according to EA principles, and possibly persuading those who don’t to start giving according to these principles.Both these opportunities seem like they could have very high impact, which is why BOAS is working on the first and CPI on the latter (among other things). ” So perhaps the better question is, are you epistemically indifferent between these two strategies and their odds of success? If not, what leads you to gauge one as more promising than the other?
ORIGINAL POST:
Hey y’all, I’m really enjoying all the research you’re doing and the anecdote about a 20% cold email reply rate is eye-opening to me. I also learned a lot about just how many foundation-operated businesses there are from this post.
One possibility I’m sure you’ve considered, just want to hear your thoughts about it—what about devoting your efforts to guiding existing foundation-owned companies toward donating to more effective charities? I think it’s reasonably well-established that 90% of all startups fail—though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is one of those “everybody knows” things that turns out to be false—so you might say the baseline odds of BOAS succeeding are 10%. Your odds are plausibly a bit better than that because, as you say, foundation-led businesses tend to be better run ; so let’s call it 15%. If you did outreach to every foundation-led company to try to persuade them that they should just give to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund rather than what they’re doing, do you think you have less than 15% chance of succeeding at that—at least, at a scale comparable to what you expect to produce with BOAS?
That might not be the right comparison, it’s just one that comes to mind. Off the top of my head, I think that your “immortalize my legacy” hypothesis is on point, so I suspect that most foundations will want flashy things with names attached rather than giving to a comparatively obscure org like GiveWell. (Side note: I wonder if Newman’s Own Foundation has more mindshare than GiveWell among philanthropists?) Also, there’s something to be said for providing a demonstrative example with BOAS to other potential orgs that is hard to capture in direct comparisons. But anyway, curious to hear what y’all think.
Brad has touched on the other subjects and I mostly agree with those so I won’t touch them.
About why we’re doing BOAS: at first we thought this was almost completely new, and we wanted to show the world that this is a good idea, that it can work, can scale, and is a high EV opportunity. I’m now reasonably convinced that this is a good idea, because we know it works, scales and is high EV (because these companies would be better investments for philanthropists versus their competitors if they gave to EA charities).
Convincing existing GC’s to give according to EA principles seems like EA’s job to me, together with CPI. EA is trying to globalize their principles and if they are successful there are no more GC’s to persuade. Unfortunately, I don’t think EA is good at marketing itself to become truly big, and with my background marketing that might be an area that I someday want to take a stab at, but I’m focusing my work on proving EA aligned GC for now (which I think has much higher EV because almost no-one is working on that versus many movement builders).
I think we haven’t seen this taking off apart from Denmark because of a lack of awareness and choice. You can’t choose to buy your car from a GC or in the case of BOAS, you can’t buy anything sustainable from a GC. So it’s critical to create the awareness and we know from Amazon smile that this could work (high growth with relatively little marketing and awareness), and it’s also critical to build choices. I’m focusing on building that choice and then move on to create awareness.
Writing a bestselling book about this idea, convincing 1000 people to start GC’s, resulting in 100 successful businesses and 10 GC unicorns might be higher value, but then again, I’m a terrible writer.
Convincing 10 billionaires this is a great idea also seems like high EV, and I think that’s something we’re already trying to do with BOAS in the form of showing it can be done and we can multiply their money. But again, I view this more as the job of EA as a whole.
Another high EV would be to establish a GC VC fund that can fund 100 of these businesses and see a couple turn into unicorns, and then we hope more and more will follow.
I have many ideas, but I’m focusing on execution right now.
That’s part of what CPI will be doing.
TY, i edited my post to sharpen my question (I had missed the relevant bit on first read-through).
The big kahuna is going to to be demonstrating the strong competitive effect of Guiding Producers vis a vis competitors. If that can be established, then the many billion dollar philanthropic sector will provide capital, and we can move towards a world in which our global economy is working toward important projects like ending global poverty and ending factory farming. The question is how we get there.
CPI’s approach will be making the public more aware of their ability to support charities through normal economic activity. The way do do this would be direct movement building, such as by social media. Also by having existing Guiding Producers and new Guiding Producers associating with the broader project and enabling people to be a part of it, this will further it as well. This also has the virtue of allowing the exploration of what contexts GC creates the greatest competitive advantages.
Influencing existing GPs to tilt their portfolios toward effective charities is good and high value, but pales in comparison to the value of the broader project. But in the networking project with existing GPs, we may be able to influence them to direct their profits more EAishly. Another nice thing is that it offers a compelling value proposition for EAs who might be skeptical of the broader project. Shifting even a small amount of the existing charity portfolio of GPs could be 10s out 100s of millions in value.
So, in short, from my perspective, influencing existing GPs is high impact/unit cost and would be a worthy project on its own. But it is several orders of magnitude lower EV than the broader project.